>From http://www.thelongridersguild.com/new-historical.htm ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India Eleanor Hopkinson was one of the very few Western women to have travelled extensively in the old Tibet. Her husband, A. J. Hopkinson of the Indian Civil Service, was the last British Political Officer and Resident in Sikkim in the Himalayas. In 1947, her 20th year in India, the Hopkinsons made a month's tour of the Tibetan administrative centres of Shi-gatse, Gyantse and Sakya to tell them - at the behest of Whitehall - that the British were gone and thenceforth they would be dealing with an independent India. Eleanor Hopkinson was born in 1905 into a large Quaker family in Newcastle upon Tyne. She recalled that, one day in 1926, her future father-in-law sent his son, Arthur, on leave from India, to call on her parents who were known to have two eligible daughters. On Arthur's next leave two years later they were married. In 1928, aged 22, she joined her husband in India, first in Kathiawar and later in the North West Frontier Province. She found herself in "part of Kipling's India". She recalled: "In winter tribesmen came down from Afghanistan with their womenfolk and camels, going as far as Bengal. They were moneylenders who extracted their interest with 'the big stick' - literally. The men were tall, burly and much bigger than the small farmers; if they couldn't pay, they beat them with a pole 8ft long as thick as my arm, bound with four brass rings." With war looming Hopkinson returned to England, living with her parents in the Lake District and (apart from two short spells of leave) separated from her husband. At the war's end (a fourth child was born on VE day) she rejoined him, by then in Sikkim, leaving her sister to take charge of her four children. India had been badly disrupted by the war, but the journey from the railhead at Siliguri up the Teesta Valley to Gangtok, surrounded by the Himalayan giants, impressed her. Her husband was supposed to be in charge of the trade route to Tibet "but that was a bit of a pretence because really it was to controlthe high border passes and to check that law and order was kept. The British Indian Government regarded Tibet as an autonomous buffer between the great powers of Russia, China and India." In Gangtok she found that the residency, supposedly a private house, was always full of visitors; her husband and his predecessor had been posted there alone, so they liked plenty of people around. Guidebooks recommended that Europeans should travel with dinner jackets. The Hopkinsons' daily transport was ponies, though Eleanor always feared that she would fall off. The daily trek on tours of duty was 12 to 14 miles at a steady pace. When breaking the news about independence the Hopkinsons went via north Sikkim - where very few Europeans, and no British woman, had ever travelled - rather than on the regular route over the Natu La pass. In Tibet they reached Khampha Dzong, a magnificent and still intact inhabited medieval castle. The Tibetans reacted to the Hopkinsons' news with dismay as they were the only outside people they had known. But in some places there were big parties: "Their barley beer was awfully good," she recorded. "One good drink did you no harm, but you hadn't to indulge." On earlier journeys she had had what was then the rare privilege of travelling to the Kingdom of Bhutan, east of Sikkim, as well as to Gyantse in Tibet. She recalled that en route to Yatung "there was a wonderful little temple with some quite exceptionally beautiful images - the first bit of Buddhism you came to when dropping off the high passes". Years later, after the Chinese had annexed the country, she saw a photograph of it: "The whole place was a ruin. The Tibetans never thought the Chinese would come - who still insist they delivered Tibet from the darkness of medievalism. Up to a point they did, but they destroyed so much. It was brutal. They wiped it flat." By the end of their posting, Sikkim was regarded as an outpost on the fringe of Empire and received no recognition. Hopkinson recalled that friends in England thought they had been making a fortune and living very well, "which was far from the case. We were simply doing our duty." On September 1, 1948, Arthur Hopkinson handed over his post to his Indian successor. Hopkinson's entry in her diary for that day reads like an epitaph for the British Raj: "Today we are no longer masters of the residency." ==============